A Rising Thunder-ARC Read Online Free PDF

guts to do what his orders required him to do…and to be willing to put his own judgment on the line when it came to those selfsame orders.
    “Captain Malachai,” he said at last, “I have exactly zero authority to ignore the orders I’ve been given. You realize that?”
    Malachai gave a single, choppy nod, her face grim, her eyes bleak once more. He let silence linger between them for two or three breaths, then squared his shoulders.
    “I have no authority,” he repeated, “but…I’m going to, anyway.”
    The last four words came out in more of a sigh of resignation than anything else, and he felt himself shaking his own head in disbelief as he said them. Malachai’s eyes lit up like light-struck sapphires, though, and her face blossomed in an enormous smile.
    “Understand me, Captain!” he said much more sharply, waving an index finger at the com pickup. “Straight to Klondike, unload your cargo, then straight to Beowulf and back to Manticore. I don’t want to hear about any other charters you’ve got. I don’t want you picking up any other cargoes. You’re dropping off what you have aboard, and your heading straight home. Is that perfectly clear?”
    “Perfectly, Commander!” Malachai said, nodding hard.
    “I hope to hell it is,” he said, “because frankly, we’re both going to be in a world of hurt if you don’t do exactly that. I remind you that the WCSA’s penalties for noncompliance are ugly , Captain.”
    “Don’t worry, Commander,” Malachai said, her voice far gentler than anything Wu had yet heard from her. “I owe you big time for this.” She shook her head. “I’m not going to do anything to screw you over, I swear.”
    Wu looked at her hard for several seconds, then smiled faintly.
    “Glad to hear it. And I’m going to hold you to it, too, Captain!” Their eyes held for another heartbeat, and then he waved his right hand at the pickup. “Now, go on. Get out of here before I come to my senses and change my mind!”

Chapter Three
    “Oh, crap .”
    The words were spoken quietly, almost prayerfully. For a moment or two, Lieutenant Aaron Tilborch, commanding officer of the Zunker Space Navy’s light attack craft Kipling , didn’t even realize he’d spoken them out loud, and they were hardly the considered, detached observation one might have expected from a trained professional. On the whole, however, they summed up the situation quite nicely.
    “What do we do now, Sir?” Lieutenant Jannetje van Calcar, Kipling ’s executive officer, sounded as nervous as Tilborch felt, and Tilborch thought it was an excellent question. Not that there was much Kipling ’s small ship’s company could do about the events preparing to unfold before them.
    The ZSN wasn’t much as navies went. There were several reasons for that, and one was that the Zunker System’s nominal sovereignty had depended for the last T-decade and a half or so upon a delicate balancing act between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Solarian League. The Office of Frontier Security’s local commissioners had cast greedy eyes upon the Zunker System ever since the wormhole terminus associated with it had been discovered, but the terminus was the next best thing to six and a half light-hours from the system primary. That put it well outside Zunker’s territorial space, which meant simply grabbing off the star system wouldn’t necessarily have given OFS control of the terminus…especially since its other end lay in the Idaho System.
    In point of fact, the “Zunker Terminus” had been discovered by a survey crew operating out of Idaho seventeen T-years earlier. And Idaho, unlike Zunker, lay only seventy-two light-years from the Manticore Binary System—three weeks’ hyper flight for a merchant ship from the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. Actually, the survey ship had been Manticoran, not Idahoian, although it had been under charter to the Idaho government at the time. Prior to the discovery of the Idaho Hyper